Best Practices videos and accompanying lesson materials for teachers

The Best Practices resources provide a "how-to" guide for replicating an exemplary civics teaching practice. One click will take teachers to a package of resources including:

Video clips of classroom activities, student and teacher responses to the lesson, and teacher tips.

A comprehensive teacher guide that includes preparation guidelines,

Background resource materials, assessment tools and ideas, and ideas for extending the concept across the curriculum.

The Best Practices resources are designed to give upper elementary, middle school, and high school social studies teachers a valuable resource for teaching about Congress and fostering civic participation among their students. The project is designed to create an ongoing resource for replication in classrooms around the country.

 

Lesson Plans on Representative Democracy

Appreciating Democracy is a lesson designed to teach students to appreciate the most basic practices of democracy in the United States: first, that people have different values, interests, and opinions; and second, that these differences are often settled in legislative bodies by means of deliberation and negotiation, with compromise and a majority vote as key elements.

Appreciating Representation is a lesson plan that focuses on how, to what degree, and on what issues people's values, interests, and priorities get represented in the legislative process.

What Makes Lawmakers Tick? is a lesson plan designed to give students a sense of what lawmakers are really like and, in particular, what motivates them as public officials.

 

Additional Lesson Plans

Suggestions for how to use Center on Congress materials in the classroom are found throughout this website. Each of the following has links to lesson plans and other teacher materials:

• E-learning modules [requires the Flash plug-in]
• Lee Hamilton Comments on Congress
• Congressional Moment radio series
• Fact of Congress television segments

For each, teachers will find an explanation of the Center’s materials, several suggested lesson plans with tools for assessing student learning, and alignment of the lessons with state curriculum standards for all states with social studies/civics standards for grades 5-12.